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Don't bother about being
modern. Unfortunately it is
the one thing that, whatever
you do, you cannot avoid.
S. Dali
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Today we have access to the ideas of billions of people through the Internet. Ideas come through the news, art, music, poetry, literature, countless videos, memes, apps, tweets, and photos. Anyone can start a blog, a YouTube channel, answer questions on Quora, hold forth on Reddit, or post a viral video. We inhabit a maelstrom of ideas, swirling, barely evaluated, crashing into each other and into our minds.
We are easily addicted to the maelstrom. We stare all day at our cell phones, ignoring our families, finding connections online, clicking through news stories, social media posts, scientific papers, funny videos, and lists of ten obscure facts about kidney function. We see and hear fantastic digital artworks, poems, sculptures, political diatribes, joy, pain, suffering, global catastrophes, wars, genocides, and every aspect of the human condition streamed to us from the farthest reaches of the globe.
It may seem that we live in an age of unbridled creativity. At least one of the seven billion people on the planet will produce some interesting idea every minute, posting it somewhere to be amplified, modified, trumpeted, or ridiculed. For many it has become a contest. Teenagers, politicians, social commentators, influencers strive to produce the next viral video or meme. You can do it by being purposefully different or intentionally the same, colorful or bleak, positive or negative.
Algorithms can now determine which ideas are most likely to infect you, which ones you are most likely to propagate, purchase, or vote for. They pool us, sort us, and segregate us. They maximize profit, votes, and even confusion. Our minds are simply the substrate upon which ideas thrive. We are shockingly predictable conduits, mirrors, amplifiers, and receptacles. The essence of our minds is reduced to a weighted sum of features, easily categorized, trivially formulaic.
What are we then as individuals? As creative beings? Bugs are not creative. Neither are cats or elephants. Only us. Creativity, the ability to produce new ideas, is arguably what makes us human. Our cell phones are now firehoses, showering us with algorithmically selected human creativity. In the context of our interconnected planet, our creative endeavors are sub-news-cycle blips barely registering an eye raise. What is the point of doing anything at all? Someone else has already done it better, sooner, shinier, and more profitably than you could have.
What's more, until recently, only humans wrote poems, composed songs, and painted pictures. Now machines can do these things. They can imitate humans so well as to be indistinguishable from them. Psychologists, neuroscientists, market researchers, and computer programmers together are converging on not only predicting and influencing our behavior, but on replicating and ultimately transcending it altogether.
In the idea maelstrom, humans serve the important role of idea consumers. Our ability to create is almost identical to our ability to appreciate. When we see something new, we have to bend our minds around it, a process that feels creative enough to satisfy most people. The collective intellectual capacity of humanity is the field over which the new idea barons battle, with their algorithmic weapons. Our role is to click, to buy, to repost. Whenever one of us does something novel, the machine assimilates it instantly, broadcasting it to the like minded, who echo it back, and we are satisfied, outraged, soothed, entertained, and ultimately placated. We return to clicking and swiping, slowly giving away the real estate of our minds.
This dynamic may not be that new. The powerful have always exerted control over the ideas of the masses. The artists have always been a small percentage of humanity, creating in the context of societal noise. But the scale of it seems new. Creating is faster and easier, audiences are larger and more focused. Algorithms are managing and contributing. The interconnectedness of humanity is higher than ever before. The dynamics of power, creativity, and society in general have been vastly optimized.
When I was a young artist, before the Internet, I was inspired by this quote from Salvador Dali: "Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid." Dali's idea, I think, was that by being a modern human, your art will be new because the context in which it was created has never before existed. I found this to be liberating. I did not need to fight to make something new, I simply need to be creative and the newness would follow. However, Dali did not need to contend with the same numbers that we do now. When a billion artists are interconnected into the same novel context, their art as a whole may be modern, but individually, the artist is considerably less valuable. Remove any one of them from the Internet, and the dynamic of the Internet, the wave of ideas washing over it, remains on track, its course unchanged.
I don't know if the maelstrom of ideas is liberating or alienating. The first thing that comes to mind is to turn off the Internet. To disconnect. To get back to the earth, the community, and disinfect my mind before I am completely assimilated. Doing so would seem to be incredibly modern.
